SILENCE IS GOLDEN
Where better to escape from the vagaries and
volume of the modern world than in the quietest
car in the world? The new Mercedes-Benz CLS
is so peaceful it's a destination in itself. Darius Sanai
When I was a child, my father was fond of pointing
out that the Rover we were driving around in
(Rovers were respectable cars back then) was
known as 'the poor man's Rolls Royce'. While this
comment had the unintended effect of making me
think that we were poor when we weren't, its actual
intention was to illustrate one of the vagaries of the
car industry. The Rover with it's 3.5 litre V8, deep
leather seats, and luxuriant build, ride and handling
was nearly the equal of the equally British Rolls
Royce Silver Shadow, which cost a multiple of
the price.
Plus ça change, and all that, I was thinking recently, while hissing down the M40 motorway past Oxford in my Mercedes CLS. Rolls Royce is now a German-owned company, and the car I was in was also German. The CLS's 'ebony and ivory' interior, effortless 270 horsepower engine, and road presence in its cream livery - you can tell when a car has road presence in the UK because other road users don't let you in, or out, or past - made it feel Rolls-ishly luxuriant. But more than anything, it was the silence that appealed: the sound a CLS makes as it proceeds down the motorway at 100 mph is no more than a hiss, which would, one would imagine, be a priority requirement of a Rolls Royce owner.
So impressed was I by the lack of decibels at motorway speeds that I actually researched the matter further when I got home, and made a startling discovery: the CLS is actually quieter than the Rolls Royce Phantom, quieter, indeed, than probably any car on the market, when it's on the motorway. The main reason is its extreme aerodynamics: you can feel the CLS slicing through the air like a hot knife through butter. The engine is inaudible, too, and even tyre noise - the bane of many modern fast saloon cars - is absent on all except the most wilfully cheap of British motorway surfaces.
This leaves just a hiss of air being gently parted by the CLS's ultra-aerodynamic frame, a sound quite similar to what you hear at cruising speed in a jet, but without any stewardesses asking if you'd like more revolting tea/to put your seat belt on/to see the dinner menu.
Since then I have taken to driving the CLS just in order to achieve a little silence. We live in a world where everything talks to us or makes noises, all the time. We complain (rightly) of air and light pollution, but what about sound pollution? The iPhone 4S asks me whether I need to buy more bread. My London taxi has a TV screen selling me tickets to the Tower; the Heathrow Express has a TV screen telling me last night's news; the BA Executive Club lounge at Heathrow has many TV screens. Emails in the office jump to life as video attachments detach and display themselves. Fine restaurants play terrible music in an attempt to be cool. I haven't been to a public library recently but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find giant TVs playing Lady Gaga and screens advertising shower gel, with signs warning terrified old ladies that they risk being thrown out if they make too much silence. Even empty hotel rooms make a noise, of whatever radio or in-house channel the corporate suits have decided the staff should switch on for you while you are out.
So my method of countering all this is simple. I climb into the CLS, late at night or early in the morning, and steer up to the elevated section of the A40 motorway in London. The Westway, to give it its local name as immortalised by The Clash in their 1977 punk anthem London's Burning, is an orphaned part of a grand plan for a family of motorways criss-crossing central London dreamed up by the planners of the 1950s. To any local or visitor, the scheme sounds horrifying now. The plan was to drive a square of elevated motorways through what are now considered to be some of the most desirable and historic parts of London: Kensington, Chelsea and Battersea in the west, Belsize Park and Islington in the north, Blackheath in the south. It seems inconceivable now, but anyone who has visited London will have benefited from one of the small parts of the scheme that was completed. Just contrast the drive in from Heathrow Airport, where you are lifted above the west London suburbs on the M4 elevated section, and can reach the city centre in half an hour if you're reasonably fortunate. Meanwhile you have to endure an interminable drive from Gatwick, where you are forced to sit in one slow-crawling suburban high street after another, a few yards from where the elevated highway would have been, had it been allowed to proceed.
Debates may rage about the best ways to relieve metropolitan traffic - and to those who say that elevated motorways blight the areas they bisect, I would suggest that many of the areas on that now long-dead proposed route are blighted in any case - but one thing's for sure. For a short midnight urban cruise, the gently curving Westway, at third-floor height, beats all comers, as the CLS, with its silent body and pillowy ride on its air suspension, floats effortlessly above the city. Taking a car out for a drive for no other reason than the peace it confers is probably not quite what the car's designers had in mind when they boast that this CLS is both more powerful and more fuel-efficient than its predecessor, but it's a tonic.
The ultimate affirmation of this came when I
picked up a friend of the family and drove her to an
appointment along the elevated section. She is not
one usually to volunteer to undergo car journeys,
preferring trains or bikes. A car journey through
London is a double trial and tribulation. But as we
eased onto the Westway and the car began to hiss
as the lights of Notting Hill flew past, she turned
the stereo up and said, dreamily: "Can we go for a
really long drive sometime?"
